So you’re telling me you added a battery and receiving circuit in there that kept listening for a signal for years, only to shred it now after it heard the right signal? And nobody ever noticed that being in there? Hmm…

Bullshit. No one ever wondered why a wooden frame with some paper inside weighed 10 kilos? When the two guys take it down at the end, you can see that it is heavy. Who triggered it? It had to be manual. Why is there a window in the back? Very few batteries could be reliably alive after a ‘few years’.

At 0:39 it looks as f the auctioneer has pressed a button idk and sometimes the frame is heavy as fuck as it could’ve been crafted from a heavier kind of wood (not too sure about that) so maybe that’s why no one questioned it.

The blades are facing the wrong way for a shredder. There’s no apparent place for the painting to come from and reach the blades. Maybe it comes from between the plank of wood and the steel plate, but how would it reach the blades from there?

The motors are oddly placed, why is one at the bottom and one in the middle? The inside seems much thicker than it needs be, there’s a stack of components on the back that could have been spread out given the ample room inside, and make the construction thinner.

The only thing that makes sense to me is that the X-Acto blades are a complete red herring — the actual shredder is under that metal plate, which hides something that is obviously thick (compare the depth on the metal side, vs the depth on the other side).

Then it makes more sense: the motors push the painting that is under the wooden panel downwards, it gets shredded under the metal plate, and comes out from the gap between the wooden plank and metal already shredded. And the blades are there just as a visual aid of sorts, because the actual shredder is impractical to show for whatever reason.

They are *not* attached in the video. Since he is using a pencil to mark the blades to shorten them later. They obviously would be rotated 90° in the final assembly. The final assembly would be without the wooden piece seen in that moment and the blades attached in such a manner they can cut the paper.

You will never know how Banksy has done it unless the person who has purchased decides to dismantle it, but they won’t because that will take away the value. Just take it on face value what it is as that’s the art of it. The art wasn’t the original piece, the art was this final piece. Banksy didn’t do it to ruin anything, he/she did it to create a memorable piece of artwork (and generate value for the piece). Just don’t let Tendring District Council near it because you know what they did… Although Banksy is free to create any kind of art that he/she (lets remain gender impartial here due to the anonymity of the artist) wishes on the side of my house if he/she’s ever down in Tendring again where it will most definitely not be painted over. Those of us that know a Banksy gave TDC hell, believe me. Anyway I digress. This was pure genius. Pure genius.

Excellent prank but without a doubt, it took place with the prior knowledge of Sotheby’s – It is the only auction house in the world that has a Department of Scientific Research and high value items like this will be subject to technology like the Bruker M6 Jetstream, spectrometry and X-Ray – The idea that they didn’t discover multiple components inside prior to the actual auction is laughable.